Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura

Writing Administrative Textual Genres in Scholarly and Professional Contexts in Spain

Sara Pistola, Iria da Cunha — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Textual genres in the field of Administration can be difficult to write for both university students and public administration employees, since they call for specific linguistic characteristics, which vary according to the genre and the recipient. This article gathers the results of an empirical study examining the perception of writing administrative textual genres for the general public among two groups in the academic and professional fields. The participating groups were made up of students enrolled at a Spanish state university and the staff of a local administration of reference. Data were based on a quantitative analysis of two surveys carried out among over 2000 people. The analysis allowed researchers to identify that the genres most frequently requested and those with which writers struggled the most, in both academic and professional contexts, were: report (informe), requisition (requerimiento), resolution (resolución), agreement (contrato) and minute (acta). It also revealed that the biggest challenges faced by both sets of people when having to write those genres were: unawareness of the proper structure and lexical choice. These findings confirm that both students and administrative professionals face issues when writing the textual genres specific to their field. Likewise, they suggest that there is some correspondence between university curricula and professional practice in terms of writing administrative genres.

Using Translanguaging to Decolonize English Language Teaching in Colombia: A Narrative Inquiry

Diego F. Ubaque-Casallas — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Today’s classrooms are linguistically diverse. Nonetheless, English language teaching still uses a separatist model in which other languages and identities are reduced and subalternized. This evident separation of languages has forced many English speakers to identify with the non-native label, prevented them from using the linguistic resources they have previously acquired from other languages to communicate and learn in given settings, and made the different ways they exist invisible. From a narrative perspective, this article documents how two English teacher educators do not conform to this native ideology by resorting to a translanguaging pedagogy. It narrates their pedagogical experiences and insights preparing English teachers in Colombia and explores how they use their linguistic repertoire as a mechanism to teach. Their narratives reveal that translanguaging is a pedagogy that allows English teachers to challenge discourses framed in monolingual perspectives. They also indicate that by implementing a translanguaging pedagogy, English teachers can foster and enact a counter-nonnative ideology that enables them to reclaim their identities. All in all, the results of this inquiry suggest that it is worth pursuing translanguaging as a language pedagogy that disrupts colonial language practices and identity discourses.

Writing and Educational Experiences in Real Settings at a Colombian University

Elizabeth Narváez-Cardona — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

In Latin America, there have been several institutional initiatives and research focused on writers' education in disciplinary and professional communities. However, there is a need for studies are needed that explore the relationships between writing and formative experiences in real environments, such as pre-practicums, placements, and internships. This article presents the emerging results of a qualitative research project that investigated undergraduate students' learnings in relation to the formative experiences they had in these environments. The analysis was done from the perspective of the students and other actors associated with pre-professional, professional, and placement practices, such as academic directors, coordinators, course instructors, and advisors. The study was carried out in four programs at a private Colombian university and was based on questionnaires and interviews with the above-mentioned actors. The analysis shows that the access, use, and production of discursive genres with socio-humanistic, academic, professional, or labor purposes are part of the learning associated with such formative experiences. Therefore, the results suggest that academic literacy advocates have a pedagogical opportunity to accompany practicums, internships, and placement practices, in order to enhance the reuse of knowledge, especially that related to writing.

Developing Cosmopolitanism Through Intercultural Mediation Activities: An After-School Digital Storytelling Project in Catalonia

Miaomiao Zhang — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

This article analyzes interaction taking place in an after-school digital storytelling project, involving a group of teenagers in Catalonia, Spain, with different lingua-cultural backgrounds. It focuses on intercultural mediation activities carried out in one of the early project sessions in which a young girl of Ghanaian origin mobilizes her previous life experience to mediate, for her local peers in Catalonia, understanding of a video produced by Ugandan youth. The data is transcribed and analyzed using a multimodal conversation analytic perspective. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of intercultural mediation, cosmopolitanism, and funds of knowledge, this article investigates the following: (a) how the girl mobilizes her funds of knowledge to mediate the content of the video and the other audience members and, (b) how cosmopolitanism is developed in intercultural mediation. The article also touches on how intercultural mediation is collaboratively constructed across modes, languages, and material objects. The findings indicate that the young participants’ cosmopolitan stances are enacted and enabled in intercultural mediation, as the youngsters can make sense of cultural concepts that they can not tackle as well on their own. The findings further help to reconceptualize the competences, knowledge, and resources of youth in the superdiverse and interconnected world.

Use of Aymara in the Chile, Peru, and Bolivia Frontiers: A Micro-Sociolinguistic Analysis

Juan Carlos Mamani Morales — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

The Aymara language (AL) is one of the most important languages in the central Andean region. However, there are few studies on its use from a microsociolinguistic approach. This paper aims to analyze the use of the Aymara language in six commercial speech events in a tri-border context involving Aymara speakers from Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The conversations that happened within these events were collected through audio recordings and written records in a qualitative ethnographic intervention in the so-called three-part fair or “Feria Tripartita” (FT), a commercial event that occurs weekly in the three-border area. The analysis is based on ethnography of communication, conversational analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. Drawing on this analytical framework, the use of the AL that is manifested there shows code-switching with Spanish, both inter- and intra-orally, along with a series of interlinguistic phenomena, such as the presence of a series of Spanish lexical bases with Aymara suffixation, and the use of unnecessary Spanish loans. Thus the FT, in spite of being an Aymara space that conforms a bilingual speaking community, is a space of influence of the Castilian language, which structurally affects the use of the AL.

Book Review: The Challenge of Subtitling Offensive and Taboo Language into Spanish. A Theoretical and Practical Guide

Juan José Martínez-Sierra — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Rhetorical Moves, Intensification, and Mitigation in Motivation Letters for Acceptance into Graduate Schools in México

Carolina Urizar Ocampo, Eva Patricia Velásquez Upegui — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

The motivation letter is a promotional genre often requested for acceptance into post-graduate programs in Mexico. Even though universities and research centers provide some guidelines for its preparation, there is not a clear description of this genre's textual structure or of its pragmatic features. Given this situation, we developed a qualitative research study which aimed to describe the rhetorical movements and the use of intensification and attenuation mechanisms deployed by applicants to two post-graduate programs of two universities in Mexico in 30 motivation letters written in Spanish language. For the analysis, we used the ATLAS.ti 9 software. Findings show that four rhetorical movements characterize this genre, namely, (a) to explicitly state the reasons for applying, (b) to present the applicant's objectives, (c) to persuade the reader, and (d), to express future expectations. Meanwhile, intensification appears to be more common than attenuation, suggesting that the applicants strive to build a valuable self-image for the selection committee while keeping some degree of modesty, given the asymmetry in the reviewer-applicant relationship. This study highlights the importance of integrating this genre and its discursive features in the teaching of academic writing at universities, acknowledging the discursive characteristics of each disciplinary community.

Causality and Positioning in the School Discourse of History in Spanish

Natalia Leiva, Teresa Oteíza — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

The discursive construction of causality involves the use of a number of resources that go far beyond the so-called "causal connectors" in the Spanish linguistic tradition. Studies in Spanish have shown that connexion can be realised implicitly and explicitly through various configurations. Some of these configurations, besides realising conexion, involve certain interpersonal positionings. This article aims to characterise the interactions between the meanings of connexion and interpersonal meanings in the construction of historical causality. In line with this, this paper analyses causal sequences in fragments from an 11th grade Chilean history textbook, from a discourse semantics perspective, using systemic functional linguistics. The analysis of the sequences allows us to observe that the system of connexion interacts with the interpersonal subsystems of engagement and graduation. In relation to the subsystem of engagement, connexions realised verbally (e.g. A allowed B) play a role in closing or opening the dialogical space. Regarding the subsystem of graduation, these connexions allow for sharpening or softening the actualisation of the causal connexion. From a multifunctional perspective on language, it is possible to conclude that the construction of causality generates couplings between logical meanings and interpersonal meanings that are relevant in the interpretation of the past.

Mitigating Function in Verb Forms Conveying Doubt in the Chilean PRESEEA Semi-Structured Interviews Corpus

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

This article analyzes the attenuating function of verbal forms expressing doubt in semi-structured interviews found in the PRESEEA corpus of Santiago de Chile. 36 interviews, collected in 2009, were analized taking into account the participants image, speech acts, and discursive positions. Verb sociolinguistic variation —as determined by sex, age, and education level— was also examined. The main doubt expressions with an attenuating function found include doxastic verbs such as creer (“believe”) and suponer (“suppose”), the modal verbs deber (“must” or “should”) and poder (“could”, “might”), and the verb expressing lack of knowledge no saber (“to not know”). These expressions occur when speakers express their true point of view as a doubt, or when they report a state of affairs. The result is a speaker directed towards the “other”, who does not want to expose their image to their interlocutor, when the speaker expresses opinions about controversial topics or when they report facts that they prefer not to express openly. Sociolinguistic variation is scarce and is mostly related to age.

Future Translators' Concerns Regarding Professional Competences: A Corpus Study

Cristina Plaza-Lara — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

When entering the job market, prospective translators face certain difficulties concerning professional know-how that they have to overcome in order to succeed in their career. For this reason, the aim of this article is to provide insights into the main concerns of future translators regarding professional competences. To understand these concerns, a corpus was created using the questions posted by future translators in a forum located on a very well-known translation site: Proz.com. A total of 125 posts were processed and thematically coded using the corpus manager Sketch Engine. The thematic codes were based on two multi-componential models of translator competence: PACTE’s and EMT Board’s models. Once the content was coded, qualitative content analysis was carried out in order to analyse the main concerns of translators-to-be in relation to professional competences. Results show that marketing, industry, and business knowledge are among the main causes of worry of prospective translators. Although the results are not generalisable, the conclusions drawn from this study provide translator trainers with a comprehensive view of what professional competences should be reinforced in the classroom.

Discursive Configurations About the Francophone World and the French Language in Colombian Written Press

Nathalia Lamprea-Abril — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

The notion of francophonie still raises many questions in various fields, such as the didactic, economic, political, and media fields, among others, making it difficult to understand the concept. In this article, we analyze the ways in which the discursive contours of the francophone issue and its representation in the discourse of the Colombian print media are defined, based on a corpus of 35 journalistic articles. To this end, we combined textometric analyses obtained with the Iramuteq® software with linguistic discourse analysis tools, in order to propose an interpretative hypothesis. On this basis, we were able to demonstrate that, in the Colombian print media, the issue of francophonie is mainly elaborated on the basis of its relationship to the French language and, more concretely, on the basis of its pragmatic aim, which configures a discursive register of education and work. In addition, there is a quest linked to the desire for social mobility, where language takes on the role of auxiliary, even in the absence of cultural, social, political or historical dimensions. From this point of view, its learning and its use are reduced to a rather technical and individual subject without considering its complex character also constituting the social.

Chilean Translators in Periodical Publications from the 19th Century

María Carolina Zúñiga Curaz — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

This article describes the characteristics of the translations performed by women in the Chilean press in the 19th century. To do this, a descriptive comparative analysis was carried out of two magazines published by the newspaper El Mercurio: Revista Valparaíso (1873-1874) and La Mujer (1877). Then, the information obtained was contrasted with the data offered by the book Biblioteca chilena de traductores [Chilean Library of Translators], and a database was created that specified translators, translations, year of publication and gender. The results show socio-contextual variables, related to the timing of production, such as the sources from which the materials were translated, languages, thematic areas, and functions fulfilled by translations in the magazines studied. The analysis also reveals a shift in the thematic areas translated, with religion and literature being displaced by opinion and popularization texts, and the patriotic or pedagogical roles being displaced by popularization and educational roles. This last role reveals the press as a pre-literary field of action where women used to deploy their social agency and insert themselves in the intellectual field. The data obtained serve as a basis for further decsriptive comparative studies and to characterize translations carried out by women in the Chilean press.

Presentation

Doris Correa — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Ecclesiastic Audio Description: The Church from a Semiotic and Translation Perspective

María Lax-López — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Audio description (AD) is a type of accessible translation consisting of a process of intersemiotic translations from images into words. Its objective is, mainly, allowing people with visual disabilities to create a mental image of the things they cannot perceive visually. In this study, we will address a type of AD that has not been explored in academic and professional contexts: church AD, where the source text is the church, understood to be the architectonic structure used for Christian worship. Our aim is to provide a basis for the study and practice of church AD. To this end, we propose three approaches: functional and contextual, semiotic and normative. The first approach describes the different ways in which churches are used today and the context in which the audio described text is produced. The second helps to identify the visual keys that form the church's meaning and to guide the audio describer in selecting translatable information. The last one provides AD guidelines or strategies that can be applied to the submodality of AD analyzed.